Job Search 2024

The Neverending Story - Job Search 2023 2024

Ok, so it’s not never-ending, there is always an end in sight. But being on the job market for the second time in less than a year has a Merry-Go-Round feel to it for sure. I will add software engineering posts and such to this blog, but I’m starting with what is happening in my life right now. So, down the rabbit hole we go…

First, let’s start with The Rules:

• I’m not going to name names, this isn’t about calling out anyone else
• I’ll keep it general
• This is about my experience alone, yours may be totally different

The Story of my Career

I have had 2 careers in my lifetime. I got a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and spent about 8 years total in various sales-related positions from selling Cutco cutlery via in-home presentations, to home improvement sales, to real estate, and finally business machines. Then I went back to my nerd roots and started over, earning an Associate’s Degree in Computer Science and beginning my journey as a software engineer. My first SE role came over 15 years ago and I have been in the industry ever since, and I love it way more than I did working in sales. I had 2 main employers over my career (5 years and 10 years respectively), and a short contract role earlier this year. Now I find myself searching again. So what’s the problem?

The Story of My Fear

I am afraid of interviewing, specifically the technical interview. There, I said it. Imposter Syndrome? Check. Some days, I feel like a dunce surrounded by Mensa members, and heck, it took me this long just to start a blog. I see LinkedIn profiles with advanced degrees from well-known IT/CS programs and my tech school degree seems about as worthwhile as a greasy napkin at the bottom of a bag of fast food. And of course those same folks have worked for the big names in Tech: Amazon, Google, Meta, IBM. And they’re open-source kings and queens, with stars and contributions that awe their fellow engineers. In short, they are the Rock-Star Developers™ that we see at conferences, and I always wonder how they got there. If they have a family, do they ever see them?

A few examples from recent memory:

1. The interviewer asked about dunder methods in Python - in that case, I asked a clarifying question and managed a decent answer, but of course I know what the __ methods are, I’ve used them to instantiate super classes wlhen initializing a child class or simply getting object info
2. The interviewer asked about await vs async and Promises in JS - I completely botched this even though I have written functions with await and Promises
3. The interviewer asked me to describe Predicates in Java Streams - the answer is literally in the English word used to name this paradigm

I have written thousands of lines of code, applications and entire unit and integration test suites, documentation, have hands-on experience as a Front End Engineer, a Back End Engineer, and learned the fundamentals of dev ops from the ground up. And yet, the simplest of questions will lock me up and leave me struggling to explain what’s in my brain box. But why? I don’t feel this level of fear in most other aspects of my life.

In comparison, I look at my wife and marvel at how comfortable she is when answering questions in her field. She is an accomplished HR professional, she has been a C-level executive, or one step down from C-level, for more than 20 years. When I ask her an HR question, she almost always knows the answer without hesitation, and even if she doesn’t, she can reason out the context around it and be back with an answer in a few minutes if she has to look up the specifics. It’s interesting what we fear, no?

The Story of Her Fear

She challenged me to use this story in my post and I think it illustrates how we’re different. Before she met me, she was on business travel with a colleague in San Francisco. Driving a rental car, she wanted to challenge herself to Lombard Street, but she found herself repeatedly driving past it, trying to work up the courage to tackle it. In her mind, there’s no way the trip doesn’t end with the car tumbling down the hill. Did she do it? Yes, after the 4th pass by.

What about me? I’m almost completely different with that type of thing. I might make 1 pass just to gauge the layout. But after that, logic is going to kick in and I’ll say to myself, “If this hill were impassable, there would be a pile of cars at the bottom”, and away I go.

So Now What?

Well, this blog is the first step in getting past this temporary jobless situation. I have always enjoyed writing, and I plan to share new projects, code snippets, and other interesting stuff here. There will almost certainly be dog photos of Cali the Dane and Tabitha the Catahoula Leopard Dog (if you know, you know). I expect to find a new position soon, but I am going to:

• build out my projects on GitHub.
• work on HackerRank challenges
• make new connections on LinkedIn (here’s me)

I’ll update this post as my journey continues…

Random Thought of the Post

My wife and I were at a brewpub the other day in the Ohio City section of Cleveland called Nano Brew, and American Pie (the song, not the movie) came on. For a song about the day the music died, it sure takes a long time to kill it.